Mailing-List: contact cygwin-help AT cygwin DOT com; run by ezmlm List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: cygwin-owner AT cygwin DOT com Mail-Followup-To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com Delivered-To: mailing list cygwin AT cygwin DOT com To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com From: Christopher Cobb Subject: Re: Not what I expected at first startup :0 Date: Sat, 30 Oct 2004 20:42:08 +0000 (UTC) Lines: 41 Message-ID: References: <1df109e3041024080862b0c5a9 AT mail DOT gmail DOT com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Complaints-To: usenet AT sea DOT gmane DOT org X-Gmane-NNTP-Posting-Host: main.gmane.org User-Agent: Loom/3.14 (http://gmane.org/) X-Loom-IP: 162.70.244.40 (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040803 Firefox/0.8) X-IsSubscribed: yes Nemes gmail.com> writes: > hello all > > New to lthe mailing list, and new to cygwin :) > > Firstly I would to ask if it is normal for cygwin to startup and just > show a cmd.exe black window as the access to the install?? > > From there I did a, "startx" and was surprised to just get another > bash shell window I presume. But this bash shell is running in a X window. You would need an X Window to run X applications. Do you have X applications that you need to use? The main reason I have cygwin installed is to have access to a power command line environment. I don't need an X window for this. Although cygwin does provide an X environment, it does not really offer a complete suite of X applications. You can browse the X11 category of the setup program to see what X applications cygwin provides. You'll see that WindowMaker, fvwm and xwinwm are there, along with a nestful of core applications. But it is not an overflowing repository of X/KDE/GNOME applications. I think the main reason to run cygwin is for the command line and to have access to X applications that run on real *nix boxes. When you say you want to learn "Linux", what do you really mean? You would like to learn some Linux applications? Many Linux applications have Windows versions (eg, Firefox, Open Office, etc). Maybe you would like to start with those. You would like to learn the command line? That's a good idea. The command line is very powerful and is an important part of mastering Linux. You would like to learn a Linux desktop environment? I'm not sure that this is really necessary. If you were able to migrate from Windows 95 to Windows XP, you can migrate to KDE or GNOME. I'm not sure its necessary to install it on top of cygwin on top of Windows to get practice with it. Go check out TheOpenCD project http://theopencd.sunsite.dk/ . Once you've replaced every windows application that you use with open source (but native windows) varieties, then you can think about switching your desktop environment. -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/